Hasta La Gadget!

A company in Japan seems like it’s pretty much purr-adise for cat lovers.

Not only does Ferray, an IT Firm in Tokyo, allow employees to bring their cats into the office, but the company gives workers a bonus if they adopt a cat.

“I also give 5,000 yen (about $45) a month to those who rescue a cat,” Hidenobu Fukuda, head of Ferray, told the Agence France-Presse.

Fukuda has been welcoming office cats since 2000, when one of his employees asked to bring a pet cat to work. Currently, nine cats hang out in the office regularly.

The feline-friendly polices have made the news before, photos and videos of the adorable office aides are making the rounds again this week. Looking at pictures and video of this office, it’s not hard to see why people are sharing these images once again.

The office cats also have their own excellent Twitter account, @v_ume, AsiaOne reports. Even if you can’t read Japanese, it’s a pretty good account for the photos alone.

By promoting a cat-friendly workspace, the company aims to counteract stress, a plan that has some solid reasoning behind it. Researchers have found links with animals can improve a person’s mood and counteract loneliness. Some studies have even found a link between pet ownership and decreased blood pressure and cholesterol. And most people who have ever pet a purring cat can attest that the act has a pretty soothing quality.

Of course, having cats around the office isn’t always ideal for productivity. Fukuda told the AFP that the company has a slight problem with cats sometimes shutting down the computers by stepping on the switches.

Maybe that’s just their way of telling people it’s time to take a break.

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Uber says it will reimburse its New York City drivers “tens of millions” of dollars in lost earnings for miscalculating its commission there for several years.

The ride-hailing company said it had inadvertently calculated its commission since November 2014 based on drivers’ “gross” fares ― before taxes and fees are taken out. Instead, it should have collected a percent of the smaller, post-tax “net” fare.

Uber said it realized the error last Friday, after it revamped how it shows drivers their earnings and discovered their commissions violated the terms of service.

The company told HuffPost it would refund drivers’ backpay they’re due, plus 9 percent interest. The average driver should receive around $900.

“We are committed to paying every driver every penny they are owed – plus interest – as quickly as possible,” said Rachel Holt, Regional General Manager, US & Canada, in an emailed statement. “We are working hard to regain driver trust, and that means being transparent, sticking to our word, and making the Uber experience better from end to end.”

But New York’s Independent Drivers Guild said the news is just one more sign of an industry in need of regulation.

“Uber’s theft of drivers’ hard-earned wages is the latest in a long history of underhanded tactics in this industry,” IDG founder Jim Conigliaro Jr. told HuffPost in an emailed statement.  “Year after year, companies like Uber, Lyft, Juno and Gett become more valuable and year after year they find new ways to take advantage of hard-working drivers,” he added. “This is exactly why we have been calling for industry-wide pay protections to stop the exploitation of New York’s drivers once and for all.” 

It’s unclear if Uber drivers in other cities have been subject to similar miscalculations. The company said it is reviewing that possibility but has yet to find another instance. 

While Uber calculates its take based on drivers’ “net” fares, ride-hailing competitor Lyft told HuffPost its commissions still are based on its drivers’ gross fares, as its agreement specifies.

“In New York, we deduct commissions and administrative fees from gross fares, as per our driver agreement,” a Lyft spokesman said in an emailed statement. “We also pay sales tax on gross fares as required by law.” 

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Sounds like one unsatisfied customer.

A Minnesota woman is accused of macing three Wendy’s employees because they served her stale french fries.

Police in Coon Rapids said 25-year-old Eiram Chanel Amir Dixson got a little salty with the fast food workers last Thursday because the fries weren’t as fresh as she specifically asked, according to KSTP TV.

That’s when the beef really started, police say.

Dixson allegedly started arguing with employees and allegedly reached through the drive-thru window, prompting one of the workers to throw a soda at her, according to a probable cause statement obtained by The Smoking Gun.

The employees claim Dixson grabbed some mace out of her car and sprayed it through the window, directly hitting the Wendy’s manager directly in the face, according to CBS Minnesota.

Officers were called to the scene and arrested Dixson for felony use of tear gas.

If convicted, she faces up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. 

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“Two out of three of my friends have body image issues,” photographer Caroline Fahey told HuffPost. “Most girls I know do.” 

In her series “Silver Lining,” the 22-year-old photographer unravels her own complicated relationship with her body in front of the camera. Her self-portraits, captured in bedrooms and bathrooms, backyards and hotel rooms, reject an oversimplified idea of body positivity ― one that implies a hashtag here or a selfie there can yield unremitting self love. Rather, Fahey invites viewers to revel in her moments of confidence, self-loathing and ambiguity, privileging not one above the others.

In one image, Fahey looks out at the viewer from the shower, the clouded-over glass obscuring the edges of her form. A small area of the door smudged clean reveals an egg-shaped sliver of flesh, a fog-framed abstraction that hardly resembles a human form. In another, Fahey bathes in an outdoor shower, while drops of water ricochet off her bathing-suit-clad form. She is Boticelli’s “Venus” in a bikini, both nonchalant and sensual as she gazes off-camera.  

Fahey, who first became interested in photography after creating a pinhole camera her freshman year of high school, started snapping self-portraits as a college student at NYU. Her first series was about being a fat woman and the emotions her physical stature inspired ― as Fahey put it, “What it felt like to be bigger.” She soon found the subject made her peers react rather awkwardly. 

“Talking about being fat makes people really uncomfortable,” Fahey said. “People really shut the conversation down or they say something like, ‘You’re not fat.’ But it was really important for me to challenge people, to make them talk about it.”

In 2013, Fahey’s relationship to her body transformed radically when she was diagnosed with a blood clot in her brain, the result of changing birth control medications combined with obesity. “It was extremely painful both physically and emotionally,” she said.

Then a sophomore in college, Fahey left school for eight months of recovery. “My eyes hurt, I couldn’t hear that well, I was very sensitive to light and sound.” The artist’s mother would temper her frustration with an uplifting mantra, reminding her that the pain she was going through had a silver lining, though for a while, Fahey was unaware of just what that brightness would look like. 

“As time went on, I started to realize what the silver lining was,” Fahey said. “Me learning my health needs to be my first priority. Being healthy doesn’t mean losing weight and being skinny. It means being mindful of what you’re doing with your body.”

Oftentimes the narratives concerning “body positivity” and “getting healthy” do not overlap. Following her near-death experience, Fahey went on a strict diet and exercise regimen, attempting to love and accept her body as is along the way. There was no one goal, no simple answer. It’s this journey she documents in her “Silver Lining” series, a nuanced portrait of trying to better oneself and accept oneself at the same time. 

“My project became about loving my body while also struggling with the emotions of being fat,” she said. “It’s more complex than just, ‘I love my body!’ Some days you’re going to feel really shitty about yourself, and it’s important to me that my photography reflect that. Sometimes I feel sexy, sometimes I feel hideous. It’s okay if some days you don’t feel good.”

Since publishing the series, which was also her senior thesis, online, Fahey has been inundated with support from other women, many of whom write anonymously, who too have difficult relationships with their bodies. The experience, Fahey said, has helped her feel more confident in discussing her emotions and struggles on a larger platform, even if it makes some people uncomfortable.

“At the beginning I was really shy and timid,” she said. “It would be very scary for me to have a conversation like this. But the more I showed my work, it started to feel seamless and easy. You don’t expect people to be going through similar issues as you, but they are.”

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You no longer have to be part of a privileged few to try out Facebook’s personal fundraising. The social network has just made its do-it-yourself donation campaigns available to every adult in the US. If you’d like help with a medical bill and don’t…